Hey everyone, a few months ago I started a new job (at GitHub) and quickly found myself drowning in GitHub notifications. The built-in notification UI works well for many use cases, but if you've used it while maintaining many repos or being part of many orgs, you know that it can reach its limits pretty quickly. In the past, I've just delegated this problem to email, using email filtering/triaging to keep track of (and ignore) notifications. This time, though, I decided I didn't want to go through all of the trouble again only to be stuck reading hundreds of PR/Issue/Discussion notifications in plain text (which tends to make my eyes glaze over) every week.

So I built Octobud, a Mac desktop app (limited support for Windows/Linux) that uses GitHub APIs to create a rich Gmail-inspired inbox and workflow tool just for GitHub work.

- Repo: https://github.com/octobud-hq/octobud

- Landing page/quick download link: https://octobud.io

I consider the app stable and very usable for real work (I completely rely on it every day, as do several coworkers), but still fairly early release, so there might be a few small quality of life issues ;)

Some quick info about the app:

- Runs in the Mac menu bar, accessed through browser

- Built with Go, SQLite, and Svelte

- Stores all data locally and manages its own notification lifecycle (does not push anything back to GitHub)

- On Mac, credentials use OS Keychain. On Linux/Windows (not officially supported yet), creds are encrypted for obfuscation but not otherwise secured.

Some feature highlights:

- All the lifecycle features you'd expect - Archive, Snooze, Mute, Skip Inbox, Tag, etc.

- Full keyboard support with 30+ shortcuts

- Rich querying language - `repo:myspecialrepo AND (reason:assigned OR author:myusername) AND -author:[bot]`

- Custom filter views based on filter queries

- Automation rules based on queries OR tied to Views (rule stays in sync with the view's query)

- Issue, PR, Discussion details are cached so you can see them instantly without having to open in GitHub unless you actually need to interact

Finally, a few notes if you want to try it:

- For using at work, I recommend PAT (Personal Access Token) auth as most companies will require you to get the OAuth app approved per-org first. If your org blocks PATs, you won't be able to use the app

- You'll most likely need to go through the extra step of configuring SSO for your PAT to use it with any enterprise orgs. More info in this doc guide: https://github.com/octobud-hq/octobud/blob/main/docs/guides/...